Numerous industries ship goods on pallets, such as simple wood planks connected to either side of supporting risers so that the pallets each have a base that touches the ground and a support surface bearing a load. A space in between the base and the support surface provides an opening through which a fork lift can carry the pallet and load. Utilizing a fork lift to carry pallets of goods from one place to another, however, assumes that the goods are neatly stacked on the pallet and conveniently wrapped in plastic or other strapping material to hold the goods in place during transit.
Certain goods, however, are not amenable to neat stacks on a pallet and may not fit entirely on the pallet at all. Goods that come in non-standard or varying shapes and sizes require particular efforts in packing for transit. One product that is particularly difficult to pack is a Christmas tree that has been cut for seasonal decoration. Christmas trees are shipped long distances after harvesting and require a pallet to support stacks of trees and bands wrapped around the trees and pallets to hold the trees in place. Placing trees on a pallet in a horizontal position and then stretching a banding material around the trees is a time consuming and laborious task.
In systems of the prior art, palletizers that arrange goods on a pallet require extreme amounts of manual labor, especially in the case of a Christmas tree palletizer because the trees are unwieldy yet need to arrive at numerous destinations with limbs intact. The prior art systems, particularly systems packing Christmas trees, require operators to arrange the trees on a single pallet and then slide that pallet to a different area for strapping before being moved by a fork lift to a loading area for shipping. The use of manual labor limits processing to one pallet at a time with no efficiency in processing multiple pallets at once.
There is a need in the art of packing systems for a palletizer that arranges and secures goods of varying shapes and sizes, such as Christmas trees, on a pallet with the option of processing more than one pallet at a time.